


Severance

by pocket_cheese



Series: Severance [3]
Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Anorexia, Anxiety, Depression, Eating Disorders, Gen, Hospitals, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, eating disorders unit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 02:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16076447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocket_cheese/pseuds/pocket_cheese
Summary: “You need to see her this week. Yes, I’m aware that the waiting list is six weeks long.” Iza-nii paces the living room, shadows of the city warping and twisting across his profile. “I’ll pay what I need to. Sensei-” There’s a pause, the tone of his voice dropping dangerously low, and he crumples into his chair as though his spine has collapsed and the earth has been taken from under his feet.“You don’t understand — it’ll be too late by then.”





	Severance

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING - this work contains material which some people may find upsetting or triggering. Please read the tags carefully. If you feel that any content of this work may upset you, I strongly advise that you look after yourself and find another fic to read.

Everywhere, there’s hands trying to reach you. Your mother’s hands — hands that you wish would hold your own — clasped in disappointment. Mairu’s thumbnails, pressing into the base of your neck as she tells you she hates you, “why are you doing this?” Your spine is bruised from when she pushed you, shaking you in some last ditch attempt to instill rationality.

  
It didn’t work.

 

There’s an ache behind your eyes, a torpor in your brain that won’t let up. You’re exceptionally tired, too tired to keep doing this, but you’re not the only one. Iza-nii looks exhausted; defeated, even. He’s wearing glasses, something he only does after days of too little sleep. Contact lenses aren’t designed for long nights staring at a screen, but he does it anyway. You know, because in the five years he’s had glasses you’ve only seen him wear them once. He’d looked tired then, after three days and nights working, but that’s nothing compared to now. His face is pinched, jaw set in a firm line, keeping in the words he doesn’t know how to say. Bony knuckles grip the steering wheel of a car you didn’t know he could drive, neon lights blurring in a whirl of vacuity. It’s another fifteen minutes before the car slows down, and you’re there, pulling into the car park of a building where you won’t be allowed to use the bathroom alone. Iza-nii doesn’t say anything as he turns the engine off. He’s looking ahead, or into space, you can’t quite tell, but when his eyes meet your own it’s unsettling. They don’t have their usual glint, and you know that _you’ve_ done this _._

 

“Kururi...I never should have said what I did when you were younger.”

 

You don’t think your heart could break any more.

 

\--------------------------------------------

 

A doctor who hasn’t been qualified for long is attaching sticky tabs to your chest, criss-crossing the wires over your heart and beneath your collarbones. He’s already taken your height, weight and blood, and made your arm hurt with an overly-tight blood pressure cuff. You think of Iza-nii driving home, of Mairu begging you to stop. Is this rock bottom, or the benchmark for which everything else must follow? Pounds falling with handfuls of hair, decimal points shifting with your self worth...

 

Two years from now, you’ll be told that you have the lowest bone density the doctor has seen in someone your age. You’ll wake up in a hospital bed on your seventeenth birthday, and there’ll be a time where you’re so malnourished you hallucinate. You won’t have a period in seven years, and when it comes back you’ll be afraid that you have internal bleeding. You’re a walking catastrophe on the brink of collapse: hypotension and bradycardia, osteopenia and elevated ketones; but you don’t see it. Even if you did, it wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing matters but staying small, and you don’t remember why that was so important in the first place. Would you have changed things if you’d have known that every day for the next seven years would be an exercise in mathematics, food invading your dreams, and destroying them too?  
  
You can’t say. Somehow, you can’t see a different future.

 

\--------------------------------------------

 

They ask you questions about your mother, who you consider entirely irrelevant to the whole scenario. She doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. Mairu loves you (or did until now), and you _think_ that Iza-nii loves you. He never says it, but he did send his secretary home and cancel meetings to stay with you. When you were little, he took you to the park and combed your hair. He showed you how to see ants through a magnifying glass, and how to write ‘Orihara’. Maybe he’s never said it, but you’ve definitely felt it. And Mairu: the one who you’d clung to as you took your first steps, who you’d spoken words to that no-one else could ever understand — your sister, your twin, the better half of you...  
  
There’s testament after testament of their love for you. You could pile them up forever, but still, the summit of their proof would always be smaller than the voice. It's all you hear, crushing the goodness from your memories and sapping every last morsel of strength.

 

Night times are the worst. That’s when your mind replays conversations you wish you’d never heard, and you’re shaky and sick and slick with cold sweat as their voices circle in your head, conspiring with _it_ until you’re sure they wish you were dead as much as you do.

 

_“You look like shit, and you act like it too.” Mairu scowls, throwing grocery bags to the floor with more force than necessary. “You’re not even trying to get better. What about me? What am I supposed to do when you die? You don’t care anymore.”_

 

_“Kururi, this needs to stop. You’re making your mother sick with worry. Look to the future, your report cards are good. You can do well in your exams if you study hard.” Your father speaks as though he’s making a trade deal. This for that. It’s logic. Focus on school and you’ll be fine!_

 

_“You need to see her this week. Yes, I’m aware that the waiting list is six weeks long.” Iza-nii paces the living room, shadows of the city warping and twisting across his profile. “I’ll pay what I need to. Sensei-” There’s a pause, the tone of his voice dropping dangerously low, and he crumples into his chair as though his spine has collapsed and the earth has been taken from under his feet._

 

 _“You don’t understand_ — _it’ll be too late by then.”_

 

\--------------------------------------------

It’s on the third day that they call in a panel of nameless judges, middle aged men and women who look at you gravely and take notes before you’ve started to answer their questions. They nod without listening and tell you they need some time to speak as a team. When you re-enter the room, you don’t understand their ruling. Not when you’ve been a good girl and sat at the table when the doctors told you to.

  
At home, you could drink and sleep and shower when you wanted, but here, in this world of glass tables that aren’t there for aesthetic purposes, you’re deprived of your liberty by staff with clipboards and lanyards. You get weighed in a papery blue gown at 7am. Breakfast is at 8am, snack at 10:30am, lunch at 12:15pm, afternoon snack at 3pm, the evening meal at 5pm, and another snack at 8pm. Main meals have a time limit of 40 minutes, while snacks have a time limit of 20 minutes. You're watched for an hour after main meals (not that that makes a difference when you’re being followed everywhere), and you’re required to fill in a ‘food and mood’ sheet, regardless of whether you’ve eaten. At first they serve you the same meals as everyone else, albeit smaller portion sizes, but the sight and smell makes you feel sick, and touching your chopsticks is an impossibility. When you raise your hands to grasp them, you shake as though there’s an invisible force pushing your hands back to your lap, and instead you grip at the fabric of your skirt and wring it so hard you're surprised it doesn't rip. You feel like a failure, whatever you do.

They take your blood pressure three times a day, and tell you that you'll have to use a wheelchair if it drops any lower.

 

On the third day, they've had enough of your not eating, and a nurse puts a supplement drink in front of you and stares at you harshly. 

"This is your last chance." She warns, but you don't believe her. After 20 minutes of looking everywhere but at the banana coloured bottle, the nurse presses it to your lips. The taste fills your mouth - you don't even remember the last time you drank water, let alone something flavoured - and you jerk your head away instinctively. It spills all over your clothes, fortified soy milk soaking your jumper. Abject horror bubbles over, how could she, what was she thinking, _why are you doing this to me_ , and you scream at her between gasps for air, because that's all you can do. You're powerless here. There's only so much you can manipulate the system, but you can't do that from your current position. You're trapped. All of your control has been taken away.

An hour later, you leave the panel with a treatment order. They tell you if you don't eat in the next 24 hours, they'll put a tube down your nose and feed you that way. The threats are coming fast and thick, and you're horrified. You don't want to be like the girls on the internet that Mairu showed you all those months ago, but you don't know how to overcome the block between your synapses and nerves. You wonder where you could escape to in Tokyo, but the treatment order reminds you that anyway you go away from the hospital, the police will follow. You think of Iza-nii and Mairu, of your parents and Aoba, and you know there's no other choice. You're already living your worst nightmare.  
  
The next banana flavoured drink you have, you choke on it and cry. It takes much longer than the time limit, but somehow, against the hysterical volley in your head, you drink it. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. I'm really not sure about this. I've been working on it for an awfully long time, but I've never managed to articulate myself as I'd like to. This is the best it's going to get currently, but maybe I'll edit in the future. I would love to hear any thoughts. If you're concerned that you or somebody you know may be struggling with an eating disorder, help and information is available at the following sources:  
> https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/  
> https://www.mind.org.uk/  
> https://mengetedstoo.co.uk/  
> https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/


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